Continuing on the past of computer history….

The origin of computing was the mainframe. A single source of storage, compute and applicants. You, in the beginning, had a clamshell or terminal connection to the Mainframe. The majority of the processing occurred on the Mainframe. It was European, USSR, and US space programs that changed the mainframe world in the 1960s. You can’t send a spacecraft to the moon, or into orbit if that craft cannot handle some of the processing on its own. But, based on the reality of spacecraft, you can’t launch a mainframe into space. It was what we called Client-Server systems. What is a client-server system? Well, you are reading this post on one. You have a client (whatever browser you use), and you connect to a server (Virily).

The concept of client-server allows the application to understand the environment of the client and push processing to the client rather than as in the days of the mainframe; the central computer does it all. The server remains like the mainframe, located in the organization’s data center. Or, today often the server can also be located in a remote network we call “the Cloud.” Client-server applications brought about the rise of Intel or AMD based servers. Initially, these were single or dual processor boxes with storage attached. It was the next evolution of the server that brought about a rise of an old mainframe concept SAN and NAS. SAN stands for a storage area network, most famously IBM’s Shark, or the EMC product line. NAS is network attached storage. SAN has a direct connection to the server. NAS is directly connected to the network.

Client-Server solutions began to rise in the late 1970s. The big initial application was email. Everyone wanted email. The rise of the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) connections allowed virtually everyone to have an email address. The scientists at CERN created a way to share documentation and test results within the CERN network. This HTTP, or HyperText Transfer Protocol, allowed a server to host what was called a web server. The connections required for Http was simply a browser on the client and a web server on the server. The rise of the internet pushed more and more applications to the client-server model. Mainframes still exist, but in much smaller numbers than they did 30 years ago.

The concept of cloud computing is our next topic of discussion.

Client server applications like Virily share processing between the client and the server. Its why when troubleshooting you have to start on one end of the other!

I am a long time blogger and technology poster.I focus on what is possible, but I also try to see what is coming. In recent years I have been focused on sharing the memories of my family, as part of my Family History Project.

standards are massively important, and the market will evolve them naturally. in the infancy of ware (be it hard or soft) it is best that there are no arbitrary standards, and just let the ware grow in natural ways…

My first consulting job was working for a company. They didn’t have any office or cube space for us to use, so we ended up sitting in the old tape library of their mainframe section of the data center. They were down to one mainframe (from 5) and didn’t need the huge (and cold) tape library.

People like your father were the drivers of that change! They kept things moving forward at a time when the pace of change was slower, or so it seemed. Looking back it was more that the pace of change was a duck.